On Thanksgiving Day 1976, a New York City police officer named Robert Torsney walked into a Brooklyn housing project and shot an unarmed 15-year-old boy at close range. The boy, Randolph Evans, had done nothing more than stand near a group of friends. Torsney did not check on him. He did not call for help.
He walked back to his patrol car, removed the spent cartridge from his revolver, and calmly loaded a fresh one, as though resetting a machine for its next use. A year later, a jury decided that Torsney had committed the killing during a psychotic episode, a moment of madness so complete that the law could not hold him responsible. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity. Instead of a prison cell, the state sent him to Creedmoor, a sprawling psychiatric campus in the far reaches of Queens, a place with manicured lawns, quiet cottages, and a history that stretched back to a 19th-century rifle range.
For a killer cop, it became a kind of sanctuary. For thousands of others, it had already become something closer to a battleground. Long before it housed a single patient, this stretch of Long Island was known for gunfire, not silence. In the middle of the 1800s, a rail line ran out from Long Island City through the flat farmland of Queens, past a small village with a modest post office.
That village was called Creedmoor, though even then nobody seemed certain where the name had come from. It might have honored the Creed family who farmed the land. It might have echoed the moors of Britain in the eyes of homesick visitors who saw something of the old country in the open, windswept fields. In the late 1860s, a captain in the New York State National Guard named Charles Wingate published a manual on rifle marksmanship, modeled on the training system taught at the British Army’s School of Musketry at Hythe, England, then considered the gold standard for teaching soldiers to shoot accurately at long range.
The manual spread quickly and was adopted by state militias across the country. When the National Rifle Association was founded soon after, the Creedmoor group folded into it. In 1870, the state legislature authorized the purchase of land there, and in 1873, the first annual rifle competition was held on the new range. What followed was a moment of genuine international spectacle.
In 1874, a team from Ireland issued a challenge to the United States, and the two teams faced off at Creedmoor in a match so tense it came down to the final shot, which the Americans won. Ireland demanded a rematch on home soil and got its revenge. By 1876, Creedmoor was a fixture on the same stage as Wimbledon, hosting competitions that drew shooting teams from Ireland, Australia, Scotland, and Canada. The rifle range did not last.
As surrounding farmland gave way to houses and streets, spent rounds began landing uncomfortably close to residents’ homes, and complaints piled up. Little by little, the range fell out of use. By 1908, Brooklyn had a serious problem. Its psychiatric hospital, then called the Long Island State Hospital, was overcrowded and outdated.
That year, the state legislature offered a solution: 200 acres at Creedmoor, sitting mostly idle since the rifle range’s decline, would become the site of a replacement institution. Plans were drawn, a railroad spur was arranged, and then the state changed its mind. What followed was a tour of near misses. A site in North Hempstead was rejected almost as soon as it was proposed.
A second in Glen Head ran into objections from property owners. A third near Jericho met the same fate. A fourth in Farmingdale fell through when the state could not obtain a clear title. Yet even in that stretch of hesitation, something had already begun.
In the summer of 1912, the site was quietly colonized with 32 patients. There was no grand ceremony. Just 32 people moved onto abandoned National Guard barracks and were put to work farming the land around them, under a philosophy that dominated psychiatric care at the time: that fresh air, physical labor, and distance from the crowded city were themselves a kind of medicine. The idea traced back to a 19th-century movement that rejected the older asylums with their locked wards and physical restraints in favor of open grounds, structured routine, and productive work.
Farm colonies like the one taking shape at Creedmoor sprang up across the country as one practical expression of that philosophy. Expansion was uneven. In 1918, the state’s Hospital Development Commission recommended buildings for 3,000 patients, and renovation of the old barracks began. By the end of that year, the population had grown to 150.
In a special legislative session in 1920, lawmakers voted to strip Creedmoor away and convert it into a military hospital for veterans suffering from mental illness after the First World War. By October, patients were being moved back to Brooklyn. By Christmas, only a caretaker remained. That effort did not last either.
By May 1921, the state reversed course and granted permission to recolonize the site. Within a month, 75 patients had returned. The following year, the legislature formally reestablished Creedmoor as a division of Brooklyn State Hospital and released the $3 million that had been authorized two years earlier. This time, the momentum held.
Construction moved forward through the 1920s, adding a power plant, patient buildings, an administration building, a firehouse, nurses’ homes, physicians’ cottages, kitchens, and dining halls. Creedmoor’s footprint grew from its original 200 acres to more than 300. It had taken 18 years, but Creedmoor had finally become the hospital it was meant to be. The 1930s brought the largest wave of construction the campus would ever see.
A single contract in 1930 added 12 new buildings at once, including a complex for disturbed patients with over 1,000 beds and another building for the sick and infirm. By 1959, the population that had started with 32 people farming an old rifle range had swelled to 7,000 patients. On paper, those numbers were a sign of success. In practice, they were the beginning of a very different story.
Not every ward held adult patients. In 1956, Creedmoor’s children’s unit gained a new director of research, a child neuropsychiatrist named Lauretta Bender. She had already built a career studying young patients diagnosed with childhood schizophrenia, a catch-all category that later generations would understand very differently, encompassing what doctors today would more precisely recognize as autism and a range of other developmental conditions. By the early 1960s, Bender had moved into a new frontier, giving hospitalized children doses of LSD as an experimental treatment.
She began the drug trials in 1961, working alongside the hospital’s director at the time, Dr. Harry LaBurt. Nearly 100 children passed through the program, some given the drugs daily, several for months at a stretch, and a handful for years. The scientific literature Bender published gives almost no indication that parents or guardians were meaningfully informed of what these experiments involved, let alone asked to consent in any way that would be recognized as adequate today.
In the middle of the 20th century, institutionalized children were treated by much of the medical establishment as a readily available population for experimental research, largely outside the reach of the ethical oversight and informed consent requirements that would later become standard. Bender was not acting in secret. She published her findings openly in respected psychiatric journals. But by 1965, the pharmaceutical company supplying the drugs cut off distribution amid mounting public controversy over hallucinogens and unfounded rumors linking LSD to chromosome damage.
Bender continued her work at Creedmoor until 1969, when she finally stepped back from the children’s unit she had directed for over a decade. The full scope of what happened in that unit would not be widely scrutinized by the public for decades. The first major public sign of trouble in the hospital came in the 1940s, when Creedmoor’s wards were struck by an outbreak of dysentery. Investigators traced it back to unsanitary conditions in the living quarters, a direct consequence of a hospital built to hold thousands but never quite staffed or maintained to match.
Other stories revealed a hospital where supervision was often thin. In 1931, a German man in his mid-20s was discovered living as a hermit in the woods near the grounds. More troubling was an incident in 1953, when two patients described as severely disturbed managed to overpower an attendant and walk off the grounds altogether. What followed was a manhunt spanning 13 states before the two men were finally caught.
By the 1970s, journalist Susan Sheehan had begun documenting the daily reality of life inside Creedmoor for her book, Is There No Place on Earth for Me? The portrait that emerged was not of a peaceful farm colony, but of an institution described, in Sheehan’s own words, as overcrowded, understaffed, and depressing, a place where patients cycled in and out of crisis with little consistency in their care. The book went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1983, bringing Creedmoor’s daily reality to a national readership. By 1974, Creedmoor had slipped completely out of control.
A state inquiry launched that year set out to count what had happened on campus over the preceding 20 months. The tally was staggering: three reported sexual assaults, 22 assaults, 52 fires, 130 burglaries, six self-inflicted deaths, a shooting, a riot, and an attempted murder, all within less than two years on a campus that was supposed to be a place of treatment and recovery. The findings triggered a broader investigation into every downstate psychiatric hospital in New York. Staff who worked the wards during this period later described being effectively locked into the hospital’s most violent units for entire shifts, outnumbered by patients committed after convictions for serious violent crimes.
Some described carrying makeshift protection into work with them, not because hospital policy allowed it, but because they did not feel security in the unit could be relied upon to keep them safe. Creedmoor maintained what amounted to an open gate approach even for patients convicted of the most serious violent offenses, leaving both patients and staff exposed to people the hospital had little real ability to control. On the 25th of November 1976, Officer Robert Torsney was called to the Cypress Hills housing projects in Brooklyn to respond to a report of a man with a gun. Torsney, an eight-year veteran of the force, was known by colleagues as a by-the-book cop with no record of prior violence or disciplinary trouble.
What he found was a group of teenagers gathered together. Among them was Randolph Evans, a 15-year-old ninth grader at Franklin K. Lane High School. Witnesses would later describe a brief exchange of words between Torsney and the group.
Then, without any struggle, Torsney raised his revolver and shot Evans at close range. Police searching the scene found only half of a pair of pliers and a bicycle sprocket lying nearby. There was no gun. Torsney did not attempt to render aid.
He did not radio for an ambulance. He walked back toward his patrol car, removed the spent cartridge from his weapon, and calmly loaded a fresh round. When his partner, Officer Matthew Williams, asked him what he had just done, Torsney reportedly replied that he did not know. His fellow officers arrested him at the scene.
He was released on bail shortly afterward, a decision that inflamed already raw racial tension across the city. Evans was black. Torsney was white. On the very day of Randolph Evans’s funeral, a grand jury indicted Torsney on charges of second-degree murder.
His defense, when the trial began the following October, rested on an unusual and highly specific claim: that Torsney had experienced a rare form of psychomotor seizure, a condition his lawyers argued had caused him to act without conscious awareness or control in the instant he pulled the trigger. The psychiatrist who reached that diagnosis, Dr. Daniel Schwartz, was no stranger to high-profile cases. He had previously evaluated the so-called Son of Sam killer and would later examine the man who assassinated John Lennon.
His testimony carried real weight with the jury. On the 30th of November 1977, one year to the day after Evans’s funeral, the jury returned its verdict: not guilty by reason of insanity. Under New York law, that verdict meant confinement, not to a prison, but to a psychiatric institution, for as long as doctors and the courts determined Torsney posed a danger to himself or others. The state sent him to Creedmoor.
Torsney spent roughly a year and a half in Creedmoor’s custody. In December 1978, a Brooklyn court ruled that he no longer posed a threat to society, and the following July he was formally released, bound by restrictions: no firearms, no association with known criminals, no work in law enforcement or public safety, no contact with Evans’s family or friends, and years of continued outpatient treatment. He lived another 30 years before his death in 2009, never having faced a criminal sentence for what he had done on that Thanksgiving afternoon. Within less than a decade, Creedmoor’s violent ward would produce a tragedy of its own.
In March 1984, a patient named Robert Venegas was in the secure unit for violent individuals, restrained in a cloth straight jacket as staff attempted to manage his behavior. At some point during that restraint, a nurse’s aid struck Venegas with a blackjack, a small weighted club sometimes used informally by hospital staff as an improvised means of control. The blow was fatal. Restrained and unable to defend himself, Venegas died of his injuries.
The death became public almost immediately. An aid was indicted on charges of manslaughter, criminal negligence, and reckless endangerment of an incompetent person, facing a potential sentence of up to 15 years. Investigators pressed further, and a fuller picture of the unit emerged: aids describing routine beatings of patients using blackjacks and sticks, and complaints about the practice raised repeatedly and just as repeatedly ignored by hospital administration. Within weeks of Venegas’s death, city, state, and federal authorities opened investigations.
By May, the unit itself was closed and its remaining patients transferred elsewhere. Several staff members resigned or faced dismissal. In the aftermath, state officials also removed three of the hospital’s top administrators from their posts. The forces that finally began shrinking Creedmoor had started years before the Venegas case.
In 1954, the antipsychotic drug Thorazine reached the American market, giving doctors for the first time a medication that could meaningfully control the most severe symptoms of psychosis outside the walls of an institution. Nine years later, President John F. Kennedy signed the Community Mental Health Act, directing federal funding away from large state hospitals and toward local community-based treatment centers. Together, the drug and the law reshaped the entire philosophy of American psychiatric care, and the movement toward deinstitutionalization gained momentum across the country.
Creedmoor’s population, which had peaked at 7,000 patients in 1959, began a long, steady decline. By 2006, the transformation was unmistakable. Creedmoor’s inpatient census had fallen to just 470. Portions of the campus had been sold for a public school and other uses.
But not everything Creedmoor produced was tragedy. The folk singer Woody Guthrie, who could communicate only by blinking his eyes at flashcards his wife had made by the time he arrived near the end of his life, died there in 1967, and his passing helped spur his widow to found what became the country’s leading Huntington’s disease research and advocacy organization. The jazz pianist Bud Powell was committed to Creedmoor for 11 months in the 1940s following a mental breakdown. And in a converted building on the north campus, Creedmoor is home today to the Living Museum, the first institution of its kind in the United States, founded in 1983 by a Creedmoor psychologist and a Polish artist who transformed an abandoned 40,000-square-foot former dining hall into a working studio and gallery where patients create and display their own artwork.
In November 2025, state officials gave final approval to a plan that will reshape much of what remains. The Creedmoor mixed-use project will convert roughly 46 and a half acres of long-vacant hospital grounds into more than 2,000 new homes, a mix of affordable rentals, market-rate units, and dedicated housing set aside for seniors and military veterans, alongside a new public school, a child care center, open green space, and neighborhood retail. It is backed by $500 million in state funding. The rifle range that gave the land its name.
The farm colony that gave the hospital its start. The crowded wards of the 1950s. The crisis of 1974. The killer cop confined behind its gates.
All of it now sits beneath ground that is being reimagined as something else entirely. Creedmoor is still there today, still operating, still housing patients who need real care. The buildings that still stand abandoned on the property are reminders of what happens when the people entrusted with the most vulnerable among us are given too little support, too little oversight, and too little accountability until it is too late for the people who paid the price.